Conservation vs. Development in the Western United States 

Land trusts are now protecting more land than gets developed across the western United States each year, according to a new census by the Land Trust Alliance, which represents 1,667 local, state and national land trusts. When this data is compared with the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on new land developed in the United States, it now appears that conservation efforts have protected around 2.6 million acres annually nationwide, compared to approximately 2.2 million acres converted each year to developed land.¹ This trend is even more dramatic in the West, where approximately 450,000 acres have been conserved annually in recent years, and 330,000 acres have been developed. 

These new trends are surprising. But even more surprising is the variation among western states. While annually conservation still trails development in most of the West, in Montana and Colorado conservation efforts now outpace development each year by more than five to one.

This comparison of these two datasets demonstrates that conservation now rivals development as a force shaping the land and communities in much of the western United States. In both cases, development and conservation, these changes are envisioned to be relatively permanent, since conservation by acquisition or easement is usually defined to be in perpetuity. But these trends also raise intriguing and important questions about priorities, efficiency, rationality, equity, permanence and change in conservation and development in the West.  

At the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West, we continue to follow and examine these trends and invite you to send any insights and comments and questions on this to jonchristensen@stanford.edu. Jon Christensen is a research fellow at the Center for Environmental Science and Policy and a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Stanford University. 

Additional charts and analysis comparing conservation and development in the western United States, based on these datasets, can be downloaded. A spreadsheet containing the data used in this comparison can be downloaded. 

Media coverage of the recent release of the Land Trust Alliance census, included stories  by Patrick O’Driscoll in USA Today , Bettina Boxall in the Los Angeles Times , and Debra E. Blum in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. 


¹ The Land Trust Alliance census can be found at: http://www.lta.org/census/. The annual averages for conservation were calculated from the changes in land conserved by acquisition, easement or other means between 2000 and 20005.

The United States Department of Agriculture data can be found at: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/TECHNICAL/NRI/1997/summary_report/table1.html .

The USDA data comes from the Summary Report of the 1997 National Resources Inventory of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Revised December 2000. The annual averages for development were calculated from the changes in developed lands between 1992 and 1997.

Although these two datasets cover different periods they are considered the best comparable sources for current trends in both conservation and development nationwide.